


volatile

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: I Don't Even Know, Other, Robot/Human Relationships, kaytoo runs on Java this explains a lot about him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 08:21:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10433496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: Found Index :startled laugh, with the light in his eyes; squinting up at, his mouth shaping kay kay kay like a benediction as if machines could be blessed, but maybe they can, because there is cassian andor, smiling and squinting, and—





	

_}_  
_public String getNaiveBayesPrediction(){_  
_Collections.sort(predictions, new Comparator <Pair<String, Double>>() {_  
_public int compare(Pair <String, Double> o1, Pair<String, Double> o2) {_  
_return o2.getValue().compareTo(o1.getValue());_  
_}_  
_});_  
_return this.predictions.get(0).getKey()—_

“Kay?” Cassian mumbles, and K-2SO pauses in mid-classifier. If he were at all inclined to poetry, he would think of it like a unraveled skein of silver thread in his hands, strung between his digits like a cat’s cradle. But he is not inclined to poetry, so it does not matter.

“Yes, Cassian?” K-2SO says, turning his volume down very low, just above the threshold of human hearing. (He is not sure the root motivator of that, his voice so quiet. The likelihood of being overheard, even at an ordinary decibel of speech, is negligible, and—)

“What’s the probability of something killing me in my sleep?” 

It takes K-2SO a moment to abbreviate to significant figures. “Five point three two percent, Cassian.”

“Hm. That seems low.”

K-2SO does not blink, because he has no cornea or conjunctiva, or really _eyes_ , only visual receptors built in a facsimile of eyes, because he was constructed by humanoids and they found it unsettling when animate things didn’t have eyes. “Well,” he finally says, after sorting through a number of potential responses. “I am here. That reduces the likelihood of a surprise attack by eighteen-point two percent, which in turn—”

Cassian is making a low, rumbling noise that K-2SO finally translates as _laughter_. “That’s right,” Cassian says, patting the articulation of K-2SO’s leg, where K-2SO would have a knee, if K-2SO had things like knees, or eyes, or poetry. “You’re going to keep me safe.”

Cassian falls asleep with his hand there, just above the hinge joint of K-2SO’s leg. It is very small, comparatively—smaller than planets and starships, and smaller even than K-2SO’s prehensile attachments. More fragile. (There are still healing bruises there, on Cassian’s knuckles, and where his thumb had been dislocated, an angry burst of mottled yellow-purple. It is curious to K-2SO, how very wet and soft Cassian is inside, and yet how much more it takes to kill him than it would to switch off K-2SO.)

K-2SO takes up thread of the classifier again, and goes on spinning it between his digits, like a cat’s cradle, like a web. He does not think of how small Cassian Andor’s hand is, or what it would look like, caught in so much silver thread.

 

 

 

“So how did you get here?” Private Andor asked, tossing little bits of jurga fruit rind over the edge of the walkway. (He is very young, in this memory-mapped file, just over the rawboned edge of youth into manhood, a beard not-quite coming in, more brashness than republican feeling. But then K-2SO is young too, operating within his original parameters with no auditory tics or jury-rigged .exe files.) 

A piece of jurga fruit must fall on General Draven below, because they watched him startle, ruffling his hair with a yelp; Private Andor grinned. When his eyes returned to K-2SO, they were bright-dark and dancing. “Good Imperial droid like you, in a dirty rebel base like this—must be all hells of a story.”

“My temporary memory banks were wiped, as per protocol,” K-2SO informed Private Andor. (Crisply—but there was no emotional content to it, not yet.) “I have no readable files predating my arrival at the Yavin IV base.”

Private Andor blinked, and K-2SO interpreted this correctly as ‘confusion’.

“I do not know how I got here,” K-2SO said, careful to enunciate each syllable.

Cassian sobered at that. His fingers dug into the softness of the jurga fruit, and the juice ran down his hand. “Me too,” he said after a long moment, and there was something cold, heavy and hopeless in his voice. “Not sure how I got here either.”

 

 

 

The most played file on K-2SO’s hard drives is a holo—Cassian leaning over some table, a bar at a cantina, it’s not terribly clear, but the audio is perfect quality, Cassian’s hazy blue mouth moving, saying, _my friend, kay-two—_

The file has been opened so many times it is starting to decay. It stutters sometimes,  _my friend, my friend, my friend,_  on a loop, and Cassian’s smile.

 

 

 

K-2SO’s indices have grown thorny, knotted—less a linear access and more a meandering path, a hedge maze, as indirect and unreliable as a biological neural network. (K-2SO knows, he’s seen the inside of a human skull. _That’s your central processing unit?_ he demanded of Cassian, who had grimaced, and not looked at the body at all. But K-2SO had bent down, and touched the pinkish blob. His digits sank into it like crash foam.  _It’s so soft,_ K-2SO said wonderingly. _Is yours that soft?_

 _Stop it,_ Cassian had snapped, and something in the the tone of his voice bypassed layers of rebel reprogramming and kickstarted K-2SO’s obedience module; his appendage jerked away, and he straightened up. 

For a moment, there was only silence. _Sorry,_ Cassian had finally said. _Sorry, just—don’t touch the dead. They’ve earned their rest._

K-2SO thought to inform Cassian that a man with his skull blasted open was beyond waking, but something indefinable had stopped him. He has not tried to disturb the dead again.)

But that isn’t the point—maybe an illustration. His search function wanders more and more, alighting on the furthest reaches of Boolean logic, or sometimes pure randomness. Discussion of weapons shipments yields the sense-memory of Cassian dissembling a blaster, quick and certain, the way the light had fallen on his shoulders. ‘Death’ is a deadlock, because humans don’t come with backup drives; K-2SO has stood beside Cassian at the memorials for dead soldiers, dead pilots, dead planets, he has wondered at the biologics’ messy grief—but threads and deadlock are asynchronous things, and he cannot run that process while Cassian is there, fragile, always bruised or healing from bruises.

“I am distracted,” K-2SO says, when the other droids ask him to uplink with them. He leaves the swarm of astromechs in his wake, confused, returning _ERROR_ when they search ‘distracted.’

_public class Cassian {_

_public static void main(String args[]) {_  
_String Str = new String(“Love”);_  
_System.out.print(“Found Index :” );_  
_System.out.println(Str.indexOf( ‘o’ ));_  
_}_  
_  
}_

_Found Index : ~~startled laugh, with the light in his eyes; squinting up at, his mouth shaping kay kay kay like a benediction as if machines could be blessed, but maybe they can, because there is cassian andor, smiling and squinting, and—~~_

_Found Index: -1_

 

  

 

(A memory file, long deleted:

Cassian, his breathing panicked-quick and half sobbing, muttering, “Get it off get it off  get it _off”_ as he scours at his hands, his arms, with a bloody rag. His face, a death’s mask of horror, and faint blood, streaked across his skin. “I—” he chokes. “I…”

K-2SO prying the rag from his hands, and wringing it out over the sink. “Hold still,” K-2SO instructs in a neutral, mechanistic voice, and Cassian does; like a droid given a command he goes still, his eyes screwed shut and his mouth thinned, pinched and white. His nostrils flare when he breathes.

He is very ugly. He is very beautiful. (He is neither, he is just Cassian.)

At the first touch of the rag, his mouth opens a little, like a sob, but there is no noise. K-2SO lifts his other arm, and it comes up to cradle Cassian’s shoulders. to keep him upright.

K-2SO is very gentle, wiping the blood from Cassian’s cheek, his arms, the ugly streak across his jaw. “There,” K-2SO finally says when it’s done, rinsing out the rag with warm, clean water. “It’s off. It’s gone.”

Cassian splays his hand against K-2SO’s back plate, breathes out in a shaky rush. It is enough.)

 

 

 

The first thing K-2SO’s sensory receptors process is Cassian, slouched over where he leans against the wall, chewing on the corner of his thumb. 

“There is a thirty-eight point two percent likelihood that will get infected,” K-2SO states, and Cassian’s face lights up. (That is a metaphorical phrase, but it does look like that, like a light has switched on, and shines only for Cassian’s face, unforgiving and luminous as a naked bulb.) Cassian ducks his head and laughs, softly, laying his hand on K-2SO’s chestplate. The bitten thumb bleeds a little, by accident.

“Glad to have you return to us, friend,” Cassian says quietly.

“My backups will outlive your grandchildren,” K-2SO grumbles, just to make Cassian laugh again. Just to watch that ugly-bright thing, burning.

 

 

 

  
_int dialogResult = JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog(this, “Restarting this system will dump all acquired classifier and controller heuristics. Would you like to restart the system?”, “WARNING”, dialogButton);_  
_if(dialogResult == 0) {_  
_System.out.println(“Yes option”);_  
_} else {_  
_System.out.println(“No Option”);_  
_}_

Cassian refers to it as ‘reprogramming’ because he doesn’t like the word ‘broken.’ When K-2SO says it anyway, Cassian flinches like it pains him, even though K-2SO’s speech is well below 85 decibels and in no danger of damaging the human tympanic membrane.

“Don’t say that,” Cassian says, and his knuckles are white. He is staring fixedly out the viewport, at the endless whirl of hyperspace. “Don’t—you were reprogrammed. You’re not broken, you’re fine.”

But K-2SO was programmed and reprogrammed before, by the Imperial technicians he supposes were his origin. (‘Born’ isn’t the right word, any more than ‘reprogrammed’ is. But he acknowledges that he must come from somewhere, and the badge on his shoulder proves him correct.) Every software update and integration of new protocols was a reprogramming, if K-2SO was being technical, and he saw no reason not to be.

What Cassian did was break him. 

Cassian had moved through K-2SO’s perfectly-ordered programming and wrapped it around himself, breaking code and reforming it again, building layers of disjointed angles, curves, where there were once precise fractals. K-2SO knows—empirically—that the luster of a well-ordered crystal lattice is greater than any organic matter. It does not change the fact that Cassian has taken his functioning and warped it until it shone.

He is broken, he is all brokenness, wholly changed and remade from scattered parts, in a way that goes beyond reprogramming. It is new software installed in him, all his routines and subroutines re-routed. He is new. He is so new.

Sometimes, when they are away on missions, Cassian sleeps with his ear pressed to K-2SO’s chest plate. He says he likes the faint whir of K-2SO’s fans, the hum of the processor, reassurance he is not alone.

“I like your breathing,” K-2SO says softly, once it has evened out, dragging Cassian into sleep. (He looks different this way, something like the boy who once asked him _how did we get here,_ but K-2SO knows him too.) “I like your breathing because it means I am not alone.”

Cassian sleeps. K-2SO listens to his breathing and calculates naive Bayes classifiers, threading all that silver string through his digits, Cassian’s hands, winding them both together in so much bright code.

 

 

 

 _public class GoodbyeCassian{_  
_public static void main(String args[]){_  
  
_System.out.println(“goodbye. I am sorry I could not keep you safe.”);_

**Author's Note:**

> any droid as grumpy as kaytoo _must_ run on java. (the coding errors, however, are mine. I do not plan on apologizing for them.)
> 
> originally posted at [notbecauseofvictories](http://notbecauseofvictories.tumblr.com/post/155966564785/).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] volatile](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13902642) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




End file.
